Newsletter

COSMOS Research Center is proud to share that Prof. Nitin Agarwal, Maulden-Entergy Chair, Donaghey Distinguished Professor, and Founding Director of COSMOS at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has received the 2026 Faculty Excellence Award for Research and Creative Endeavors from the Donaghey College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (DCSTEM) College.

This prestigious recognition honors faculty whose research or creative endeavors have been particularly successful and have received recognition locally, nationally, and globally. Prof. Agarwal’s selection highlights his groundbreaking contributions to social computing, AI, cognitive security, online influence, and the study of digital and socio-cognitive behaviors across modern information and communication platforms.

At COSMOS, Prof. Agarwal leads research that advances understanding of how online narratives, influence campaigns, and digital behaviors emerge, evolve, and spread across social media and other networked environments. His work has supported the development of analytical tools and capabilities used to study cognitive threats, online manipulation, and adversarial information activities.

Prof. Agarwal’s research portfolio has received more than $60 million in funding from agencies including the U.S. Department of Defense, DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of State, and his publicly available social media analysis tools have supported organizations such as U.S. SOCOM, CYBERCOMMAND, EUCOM, INDOPACOM, NATO StratCom, defense agencies across Europe, Australia, and Singapore, and the Arkansas Attorney General’s office; his scholarly record includes 12 books and more than 400 peer-reviewed research articles with over 7,000 citations and more than 30 best paper awards, and his work has been recognized by NATO’s Innovation Hub as a top solution for countering cognitive warfare, while his COVID-19 Scam Tracker was recognized by the World Health Organization as a key technological innovation during the pandemic.

Beyond his research achievements, Prof. Agarwal has mentored and graduated close to 100 students, many of whom have gone on to leadership roles in academia and top global companies. This recognition reflects not only his sustained research excellence but also COSMOS’s continued commitment to advancing impactful, interdisciplinary research at the intersection of AI, social computing, cognitive security, and smart health.

We are thrilled to announce that three new COSMOS studies have been accepted and presented at the 30th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2026) in Jakarta, Indonesia. The Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) is one of the leading international conferences in information systems and the only Association for Information Systems conference dedicated to the Pacific Asia region. 

Publishing here is a strategic milestone because our current research extensively analyzes digital protest movements in Indonesia, specifically examining the widespread 2025 protests that fragmented across platforms such as X, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Supported by research grants focused on the Indo-Pacific region, presenting our findings in Jakarta places our research directly at the heart of the region we are studying.

Globally, these studies redefine how we track digital collective action across fragmented digital ecosystems. By moving beyond outdated models that focus solely on individual influencers, our new frameworks provide platform governors, policymakers, and global researchers with replicable tools to audit AI-driven recommendation bias, track the spread of narratives, and monitor the behavioral unity of online movements before they peak. 

The first paper, “Narrative Shifts in YouTube Recommendation Networks: A Depth-Based Analysis of the Indonesian Protest,” investigates how YouTube’s AI recommendation algorithms actively reshape user exposure to political events. Using the Contextual Influence–Focal Structure Analysis (CI-FSA) framework, it reveals that as users dive deeper into algorithmic recommendations, protest-heavy content is gradually diluted and replaced by apolitical or government-response narratives. 

The second study, “Toxic Unity: Behavioral Homogenization and the Inverse Toxicity-Cohesion Mechanism in Protests”, applies the Multilayer Behavioral Homogenization Framework (MBHF) to explore a counterintuitive paradox. By examining over 147,000 tweets, the paper discovers that extreme behavioral cohesion during protests is inversely related to collective toxicity, proving that group unity is driven primarily by shared ideological alignment rather than direct social interaction. 

Finally, “Focal Collective Actors as Narrative Structures: Cross-Platform Brokerage in Digital Protest” examines how protest narratives persist across highly fragmented social media platforms such as X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where users rarely share the same identities. Applying the CI-FSA framework, we show that cross-platform continuity is sustained not by highly visible individual influencers but by structurally embedded “collective brokers” who link different discursive spaces.

Collectively, these publications reinforce COSMOS’s continued mission to explain, measure, and mitigate complex information challenges in today’s digitally connected world.

COSMOS Research Center is pleased to announce a recent publication in Springer’s Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining titled “Discovering Cross-Platform Narrative Flow Templates Using Frequent Subgraph Mining,” authored by Ridwan Amure and Nitin Agarwal.

Social media narratives rarely remain confined to a single platform. They often move across digital ecosystems, adapting to the unique affordances of each space, from long-form commentary on YouTube to short-form expression on TikTok, public discourse on X, and visual storytelling on Instagram. This study addresses the need to better understand how narratives evolve across platforms over time.

The paper introduces a graph-mining framework for discovering narrative flow templates, which are recurring structural patterns that describe how narratives propagate between platforms. By adapting the SoPaGraMi algorithm for frequent subgraph mining, the study moves beyond traditional sequence-based approaches and captures more complex, non-linear diffusion structures in cross-platform discourse.

Using the recent Tariff War as a case study, the research analyzes narrative activity across YouTube, TikTok, X, and Instagram. The framework uncovers distinct diffusion motifs, including platform pathways associated with pro-American, pro-Chinese, and cooperative US-China narratives. These findings show how different platforms can serve complementary analytical, expressive, and visual functions in shaping online discourse.

This work contributes to the growing field of computational social science by offering a scalable approach for identifying coherent cross-platform diffusion structures. It advances COSMOS’s broader efforts to understand how narratives spread through multimodal social ecosystems and how data-driven methods can support deeper analysis of online information dynamics.

Read the full article here.

At the prestigious 14th International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (Complex Networks 2025) in New York, researchers from the COSMOS Research Center unveiled groundbreaking advancements in content moderation. These presentations shift the focus of digital governance away from isolated internet trolls, offering instead smart, automated ways to break up coordinated groups spreading online hate.

The first study, “Optimizing Focal Toxic Structure Selection for Social Network Disruption,” introduces a mathematical framework that combines Weighted Focal Structure Analysis (WFSA) with optimization algorithms. Instead of hunting down individual users, this tool precisely selects and breaks up tight-knit toxic communities. When tested on networks with over 520,000 users across platforms like Telegram and Twitter, this approach successfully removed up to 85% of network toxicity. This strategy proved 4.2 times more efficient than traditional methods while staying strictly under a platform’s realistic user ban limits.

The second study, “Toxicity-Driven Behavioral Homogenization in Multilayer Political Networks,” explores how people interact during political crises like the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Researchers discovered that fiercely opposing political groups often end up adopting the exact same toxic behaviors. By tracking users across multiple levels of interaction, they proved that online hate spreads primarily through shared political beliefs and ideological alignment, rather than through genuine social friendships.

The third study, “Weighted Focal Structure Analysis for Coordinated Toxicity Propagation in Social Networks,” focuses on how these toxic groups amplify harm. Using advanced simulations that model the spread of toxicity like a virus, the researchers found that coordinated groups spread harmful content up to 96.9% faster than individual influencers can on their own. They also discovered that the most accurate way to predict this spread is by using a model that specifically accounts for human skepticism, reflecting our natural resistance to harmful content.

While each study uses advanced network science, they approach digital toxicity from different, complementary angles. Together, these latest innovations from the COSMOS Research Center offer major digital platforms a definitive, highly scalable blueprint for safely dismantling organized disinformation campaigns and protecting healthy democratic conversations online.

What role do you play at COSMOS?

I am a Data Engineer at COSMOS, where I help build scalable, robust, and resilient data pipelines that power socio-computational research and tools.

Please share a bit about your professional background and experience.

I’m Sanket Bhangale, originally from India, and I recently graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree.

My background combines software development with data engineering, which I look forward to applying to COSMOS Research Center’s initiatives.

What attracted you to join the COSMOS Research Center? What aspects of COSMOS’s vision, mission, and culture stood out to you and why?

What drew me to Prof. Nitin Agarwal was the real-world impact of the work he is leading at COSMOS. Prof. Agarwal has established an interdisciplinary team of researchers working at the intersection of social computing, artificial intelligence, and data science to understand digital behaviors and forecast trends for social good, which is quite remarkable.

That kind of mission, where cutting-edge technology directly serves society, is exactly the environment I wanted to grow in as a Data Engineer. I was also inspired by Prof. Agarwal’s deep commitment of transitioning research into usable software tools to bring research closer to the community. Prof. Agarwal’s work has been recognized by organizations such as the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, NATO, and the World Health Organization for over two decades.

How do you anticipate your role at COSMOS helping your growth on both a personal and professional level? Are there any specific skills or experiences you’re looking to gain?

Professionally, I am eager to learn how LLMs can be applied to real-world social and behavioral data. The research environment created by Prof. Agarwal at COSMOS gives me direct exposure to that frontier.

Personally, being part of a globally diverse, mission-driven team will sharpen how I think, collaborate, and solve problems at scale.

From your experience, what tips, insights, or advice would you share with someone starting a new role at COSMOS?

Having clear fundamentals is the most important thing at COSMOS. Prof. Agarwal is leading some of the most advanced research projects solving pressing real-world problems. The work at COSMOS is deep and fast-moving, and understanding things fundamentally, rather than relying only on surface-level solutions, is what’s needed and motivates me to keep coming back every day.

If you could share a meal with any historical figure or fictional character, who would it be, and what would you want to talk about and learn from them?

I would choose Ratan Tata. Beyond his business legacy, what I admire most about him is how he led with humility and integrity on a scale.

I would want to talk about how he balanced bold vision with staying grounded, how he made decisions under pressure, and what it truly means to build something that outlasts you.

What role do you play at COSMOS?

At COSMOS, I work as a Data Engineer, primarily contributing to Research Engineering at the intersection of data collection, data engineering, and AI. My work involves building and supporting the systems that power research workflows and enable large-scale analysis. Beyond engineering, I’m also part of the design team, where I create visual assets such as newsletter headers and social media graphics that help communicate COSMOS’s work to a broader audience.

Please share a bit about your professional background and experience.

I recently completed my Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and have experience spanning AI systems, data engineering, and scalable application development. I’ve worked in security engineering, co-founded two startups, and built data pipelines, AI-powered platforms, and agent-based systems focused on solving real-world problems. At COSMOS, I’m excited to apply data-intensive and AI-driven approaches to study complex social systems and contribute to research that creates meaningful impact.

What attracted you to join the COSMOS Center? What aspects of COSMOS’ vision, mission, and culture stood out to you, and why?

What attracted me to COSMOS was the opportunity to work on research that extends beyond building technology for its own sake and instead addresses real societal challenges. Prof. Agarwal’s vision of using computational methods and AI to understand complex online behaviors, information ecosystems, and emerging cognitive threats strongly resonated with me because it combines rigorous research with meaningful impact.

How do you anticipate your role at COSMOS helping your growth on both a personal and professional level? Are there any specific skills or experiences you’re looking to gain?

I believe my role at COSMOS will help me grow both as an engineer and as an individual. I’m excited to strengthen my skills in research engineering while gaining deeper exposure to systems and network engineering, particularly the server infrastructure that powers large-scale research. I also look forward to learning from an interdisciplinary team and broadening my perspective through collaboration and continuous learning.

From your experience, what tips, insights, or advice would you share with someone starting a new role at COSMOS?

I would say it would be to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals. The work at COSMOS is Integrative and constantly evolving, so being curious, adaptable, and willing to learn goes a long way. A solid foundation in the basics makes it much easier to understand new concepts, collaborate effectively, and make meaningful contributions from the start.

If you could share a meal with any historical figure or fictional character, who would it be and what would you want to talk about and want to learn from them?

Even though not historical, it would have to be Hideo Kojima. I’ve always admired how he pushed the boundaries of what video games could be by blending cinematic storytelling with interactive experiences. His journey is equally inspiring. From facing rejection early in his career to building his own game studio and creating globally influential titles through sheer conviction and creativity. I’d love to talk to him about how he approaches innovation, balances artistic vision with execution, and remains resilient in the face of uncertainty. I think there is a lot to learn from someone who continuously redefines the limits of their craft without compromising on their ideas.

COSMOS Research Center continues to push the boundaries of socio-computational research, unveiling two groundbreaking studies at the prestigious 14th International Conference on Complex Networks and their Applications (Complex Networks), New York, USA. This conference brings together global leaders in computer science and network modeling to address the world’s most pressing digital threats.

The first study, entitled “Competing Narratives on TikTok: Modeling Taiwan’s 2024 Election Dynamics,” examines how conflicting storylines spread and compete, using empirical data from TikTok during Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election. Introducing a novel stance-aware epidemiological framework, the authors categorized users based on whether they actively promote, oppose, or remain skeptical of a narrative. By modeling this ideological resistance, the authors achieved significantly higher predictive accuracy compared to classical and non-stance-aware contagion tracking models. Overall, the results demonstrate that incorporating user stance significantly improves the prediction of narrative virality, revealing that raw transmission speed and the time it takes for users to shift their beliefs are the true engines of online spread.

The second study, entitled “Narrative Diffusion in Social Topologies: A Comparative Study of LLM-Driven Dynamics,” investigates how geopolitical narratives regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict diffuse and transform across synthetic social networks using Generative AI models. Using large language models like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro, the analysis shows that a network’s underlying “shape” dictates a narrative’s fate: scale-free networks (hub-heavy platforms) maximize a story’s reach while keeping the original message highly stable, whereas small-world networks (tight-knit communities) restrict reach but heavily mutate the narrative’s meaning. The study also reveals that Gemini promotes greater creative transformation of content, whereas GPT-4o acts conservatively and favors stability. Overall, the findings suggest that the joint role of network structure and generative AI behavior critically shapes digital information flows, offering a new framework for studying AI-mediated information operations.

Both studies leverage advanced computational approaches to analyze digital communication, but they differ in focus and methodological emphasis. The narrative diffusion study applies advanced large language models to synthetic environments to interpret how content mutates as it flows through different network topologies. In contrast, the TikTok study employs mathematical epidemiological modeling against real-world video data to map how the ideological stances and active pushback of human users shape the trajectory of competing storylines.

Together, these studies demonstrate the power of social computing in uncovering nuanced patterns in digital communication, whether through structural network simulations or stance-aware user tracking. Scientifically, they advance methods for integrating generative AI behaviors and complex human belief states into information diffusion frameworks; societally, they offer actionable insights for platform governance, providing clear evidence that structural interventions like algorithmic throttling and rapid fact-checking are essential to mitigate harmful online campaigns.

COSMOS continues to advance global scholarship in computational social science and network analytics with a comprehensive new survey published in the Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining, a leading Springer Nature journal. This research examines the emerging field of “Computational Narratology“, which tracks how emotionally charged, structured stories propagate and evolve across online networks. Unlike traditional information diffusion models that treat social media posts as static, atomic units, this survey highlights the need for frameworks that capture the dynamic, interpretive nature of human storytelling. By synthesizing almost eight decades of interdisciplinary scholarship, the research introduces a detailed taxonomy of computational models, including narrative tracking models, role-based event chains, multimodal variational methods, and stance-aware epidemic adaptations, capable of tracking how complex storylines mutate, change in stance, and cross platform boundaries.

Key findings reveal that traditional information diffusion models fall short when capturing “semantic drift”, the phenomenon where stories continuously shift in tone, framing, and intent as they are remixed or satirized across polarized communities. The research demonstrates that modern narratives are inherently multimodal and multilingual, revealing that accurate tracking requires new cross-modal reasoning frameworks to follow storylines that blend text, memes, videos, and emojis while migrating across vastly different platform ecosystems.

The research highlights how narrative spread online is not merely the passive transmission of data but an active process where users act as co-authors, reshaping stories through collective interaction patterns and shared cultural resonance. By identifying critical gaps such as the lack of annotated narrative datasets, platform data restrictions, and the heavy use of sarcasm and figurative language, the survey establishes a methodological foundation for capturing the nuanced dynamics of online storytelling, offering a powerful tool for analyzing public discourse and identifying coordinated narrative manipulation.

This work underscores COSMOS’s leadership in AI-powered social media analytics, combining computational social science, network modeling, and ethical AI to solve pressing real-world problems. By publishing in Springer’s Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining, COSMOS continues to contribute to international scholarship on narrative evolution, collective sensemaking, and the resilience of online ecosystems. Read the full article here.

COSMOS Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock is proud to highlight U.S. Senator John Boozman’s continued support for its research in online behavior, social media analytics, and national security. The support recognizes COSMOS’s role in advancing research that helps address emerging challenges in the digital information environment, including disinformation, foreign influence operations, and cognitive threats.

The online behavioral research conducted by COSMOS is so important now because of all the disinformation in the world,” U.S. Senator John Boozman said. “I am pleased to support UA Little Rock and its Collaboratorium for Social Media and Online Behavioral Studies. This award recognizes the significance of this program to our national security,” Senator Boozman said. “The important research conducted here will enhance our ability to counter the use of novel social media tactics by foreign extremists and terrorist groups threatening the United States and our allies.”

Through its interdisciplinary research, COSMOS studies how information spreads across online networks and develops analytical tools to detect, model, and understand coordinated digital behavior. This work contributes to national defense and security efforts by strengthening capabilities to identify and respond to adversarial narratives, influence campaigns, and emerging threats across social media platforms.

“We are extremely grateful for the support from UA Little Rock leadership and U.S. Senator John Boozman for championing this vital research,” Prof. Nitin Agarwal said. “This funding will help COSMOS Research Center to continue to develop analytical tools and capabilities to strengthen our national defense and security apparatus against cognitive threats.”

Prof. Agarwal continued, “The support allows us to deepen our research impact while preparing students to lead in high-demand intelligence and analytics fields.”

What role do you play at COSMOS?
I am a Graduate Research Assistant at the COSMOS Research Center.

Please share a bit about your professional background and experience.
I am a Master’s student in Information Science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a Graduate Research Assistant at the COSMOS Research Center. I bring more than seven years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on building software products for the financial technology sector.

My professional background includes contributing to high-scale open banking systems and AI-powered identity verification infrastructure for enterprise businesses. My experience spans software engineering, product management, machine learning research, and cloud engineering.

What attracted you to join the COSMOS Center? What aspects of COSMOS’s vision, mission, and culture stood out to you, and why?
I was excited to work with Prof. Nitin Agarwal on artificial intelligence and social computing research because of the strong alignment between my background in software engineering and his pioneering work at COSMOS in social media and narrative analysis.

My experience has centered on solving real-world problems through software systems, and COSMOS provides an opportunity to apply that problem-solving mindset to impactful AI research. Prof. Agarwal’s vision for using computational methods to understand complex online behaviors and digital information ecosystems strongly aligns with my interests in AI engineering and applied research.

How do you anticipate your role at COSMOS helping your growth on both a personal and professional level? Are there any specific skills or experiences you’re looking to gain?
Through my role at COSMOS, I hope to further expand my technical and research capacity in AI engineering while contributing to the design, implementation, and study of AI-driven software systems.

Prof. Agarwal is a well-recognized global research leader in AI and social computing, and working with him allows me to stretch toward a global-first research mindset. I look forward to learning how to apply my software engineering and problem-solving skills to artificial intelligence research that addresses societal challenges.From your experience, what tips, insights, or advice would you share with someone starting a new role at COSMOS?
My advice would be to keep an open mind and do the work needed to build capacity. COSMOS is a place where learning, research, and real-world problem-solving come together, so being open to new ideas and willing to grow is very important.

If you could share a meal with any historical figure or fictional character, who would it be, and what would you want to talk about and want to learn from them?
I would like to share a meal with Nelson Mandela. I would like to ask him how he stayed focused and relentless in the midst of a difficult situation where the personal reward was not immediately visible. I believe there is a lot to learn from his patience, resilience, and commitment to a larger purpose.